Use of telephones and related communication devices range from casual calls between family and friends to serious communications between a person and a business, business to business and within a business. During such telephone calls, parties often desire to exchange information, documents or other items, or to have information sent from one party to the other. During such transfers, one party is often in the position of having to rely on the validity of the information, documents or items (hereinafter “objects”) transferred from the other. For example, a first party of a telephone call must assume a certain level of trust for any objects delivered by the second party.
In further examples, the second party provides the first party with their identity, such as “Patient Registration Department of Local Hospital”, “Shipment Department of Local Hardware Store”, “Credit Card Fraud Unit of Major Bank”, or a given name or surname. The first party assumes that the identity is authentic and trusts the objects delivered by the second party.
Likewise, by way of example, the first party might receive a telephone call from the second party, and the telephone service provides the first party with the caller identity of the telephone call. While the first party assumes that the caller identity represents the second party and thus trusts the objects delivered by the second party, the caller identity might, in fact, identify only a telephone subscription used by the second party to make the telephone call, and not the actual identity of the second party.
While an assumption of trust may be sufficient for casual telephone calls, such as between friends and family, it is not necessarily sufficient for more serious or business-related communications, such as between a business and its customers or document exchanges between businesses. This demonstrates the need to provide a solution for authenticating the delivery of objects from one party to another during or in association with a telephone call or other communication between parties.
It is thus desirable to provide a method and system that allows a party to authenticate the delivery of objects from another party in association with a telephone call or other communication.